Mobile computing devices are prevalent today. Users often travel to various locations for business and/or pleasure, and often need to retrieve data from one or more networks. The data is often stored on more than one server and the servers are often located in various geographic locations. Thus, a user wishing to connect to a network must decide which server to connect to.
Although several methods exist for determining which network resource to connect to, these methods suffer from a number of drawbacks. For example, some methods calculate the response time for a number of available servers, employ subnet masks, and/or force users to choose an appropriate server from a list. It will be appreciated that the determination of a response time for each server in a sophisticated communication network employing numerous servers can be quite time consuming. Furthermore, forcing the user to choose a server can be complicated and possibly confusing to the user. If the user is traveling, for example, to a location in the Midwest, and servers are available in both the east and the west, the user would have to make a determination of which location is closer.
Other methods and systems include the user of dedicated network elements, such as, for example, redirecting servers, to provide options to the user indicating the most appropriate servers to connect to. It will be appreciated that the user of such redirecting servers require network integration, ties up network resources, and requires the user device to communicate with the redirecting server in addition to sustaining its communications session with a network server.